Wow.
Mushroom expert (what an inadequate word!) Paul Stamets preaching the gospel of Mycelium.
Showing posts with label Environmentalism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Environmentalism. Show all posts
Tuesday, September 09, 2008
Monday, May 26, 2008
Gov Schwarzenegger at the Yale Climate Change Conference
The Governator says Environmentalism is sexy:
Successful movements are built on passion. They're built on confidence. They're built on Teddy Roosevelt's bully pulpit. They're built on critical mass and often they're built on an element of alarm that galvanizes action.He whines a bit about environmentalists blocking power lines, but for the most part, it's amazing how... well, how the climate has changed. :)
I believe the environmental movement is switching over from being powered by guilt to being powered by something much more positive, something much more dynamic, something much more capable of bringing about revolutionary change. Its image is also changing from one of hand‑wringing and whining to one that is hip, an image that is cutting edge, forceful and self‑confident and even sexy.
Wednesday, May 14, 2008
Organic Farming Sequesters Carbon
Could organic farming be one of the major engines in scaling back atmospheric carbon? Rodale Institute CEO Tim LaSalle thinks so:
Simple everyday tasks, such as what food you buy, can either contribute to—or reduce—global warming. Rodale Institute research shows that organically managed soils can store (sequester) more than 1,000 pounds of carbon per acre, while non-organic systems can cause carbon loss. For consumers, this means that the simple act of buying organic products can help to reduce global climate change.Watch the whole interview...
Thursday, February 14, 2008
Biofuels: "Worse than we thought"
The word has been trickling out that the latest attempt by big energy to jump on the green bandwagon is, in fact, an environmental disaster.
Via Kevin Drum, biofuels guru Mike O'Hare says recent studies have shown that, once you take all the factors into account, corn-based ethanol and similar fuels actually dump much more CO2 into the environment.
Via Kevin Drum, biofuels guru Mike O'Hare says recent studies have shown that, once you take all the factors into account, corn-based ethanol and similar fuels actually dump much more CO2 into the environment.
There is now more than good reason to expect that no biofuel from seeds, possibly none (even cellulosic) grown on land that could grow food, will reduce global warming if substituted for petroleum products...
(There's more...)
The first piece of the puzzle is the recognition that if a piece of forest is cut down, or natural grassland plowed up, to grow biofuel, decay and/or burning of what was there before releases an enormous puff of carbon into the atmosphere that needs to be counted along with the carbon releases of the biofuel crop. Even spreading the initial release over decades of biofuel growing, it is large enough to push almost any biofuel's global warming intensity way above that of gasoline, especially because it all occurs right at the beginning of the future rather than a few years or decades down the line...
Small amounts of diesel and ethanol will probably be available from trash and agricultural waste like the tree branches and bark scraps the logging industry leaves around to decay, or cornstalks, or McDonald's used frying oil, and these are environmentally OK because they don't induce land use conversion....And many smart folks in this business expect that algae growing in tanks in the desert (for example) can eventually be taught to make a lot of diesel cheap, with no land use implications. But for now, and for a while, biofuels generally are going over a very rough patch of road, a patch that may go on for years before new technologies smooths it out again.
Monday, February 11, 2008
People Power
More cool toys...
First, it was the flashlight you charged up by shaking it a few times. Never again to frantically search for batteries by candlelight when the power goes out...
Now, scientists at Vancouver's Simon Fraser University are developing a knee-brace that charges up electronics as you walk.
Max Donelan's team's work has spawned a startup called Bionic Power, which has received seed investment but no rounds of venture capital. Donelan told Wired.com that their initial markets were "people whose lives depend on portable power." These off-grid power users include backwoods hikers and the military, which is always looking for ways to reduce energy usage. Donelan called soldier battery use "astonishing," noting that soldiers can pack 30 pounds of batteries for a 24-hour mission. All those batteries add up to an equally astonishing $57,000 per soldier per year in battery costs.They've got a video up explaining the core technology... worth checking out.
(Image courtesy Simon Fraser University)
Saturday, February 02, 2008
Car Culture and Cul de Sacs
James Howard Kunstler has been one of America's leading curmudgeons for the past 20 years. He was in Vancouver last week, spreading his iconoclastic (or perhaps "autonoclastic") notions that we are at the end of the era he calls "Happy Motoring" and entering the twighlight struggle of "The Long Emergency".
His weekly posts at Clusterfuck Nation are must-reads for anyone who is worried about the current state of America and the world - that is, anyone who has been paying attention.
What's scary about this interview is: It's from 13 years ago. And nothing has changed - the situation has only gotten more critical.
James Howard Kunstler and
The Geography of Nowhere.
Interview with Jeremy Bloom
By looking at how our towns and cities grew - from Long Island to Detroit to Disneyland - Kunstler is doing more than the proverbial "talking about the weather" of our urban environment; he is attempting to do something about it. He points out what he thinks are the mistakes that were made, and also looks to the future with some hopeful changes, some of which are already in motion. It's an important issue: important enough that "The New York Times" has run reviews of "The Geography of Nowhere" in both the Book Review and the regular daily Times, as well as running an Op-ed Page piece by Kunstler.
We chatted with him on a warm summer day, sitting on the wide, carnival-painted porch of his Victorian Saratoga Springs house. Holding a glass of frosty iced tea in one hand, he contemplates the cover of "The Geography of Nowhere," with its pictured vista of Long Island's suburban sprawl.
J.H.K.: I wanted to call the book "Why America is So Fucking Ugly," but my publisher and I settled on "The Geography of Nowhere"
(There's more...)
JB: So we're nowhere, and it's ugly. How did we get here?
J.H.K.: We had an incredible imperial boom from to '50s to the '70s. The Interstate Highway System was going up, everyone was getting a new house with an FHA mortgage. People were making money off this stuff and the horizon seemed limitless. Very few people were thinking of the consequences - and particularly the unforseen repercussions, the hidden costs.
We have done incredible damage to our culture, to our spiritual life in this country, and our civic life. To any notion of the common good.
It boils down to this: we build too many places that are not worth caring about, and we've destroyed our civic life in the process. If we're going to continue to be a viable civilization, we're going to have to build places we can care about - and if we do that, we will enjoy civic life once again.
All these things may seem to be abstractions, but they are no more abstract than, for instance, the concept of justice - which is very important to Americans.
There are some ideals that we are going to have to pay attention to that are different from the ones we've been looking at over the last 20 years.
JB: But this is very abstract and complex: we're talking here of a juxtaposition of questions of natural law, aesthetics, as well as questions of efficiency and economics questions....
J.H.K.: Most people think of this problem only in terms of aesthetics. They drive down some gruesome commercial strip like Central Avenue in Albany, and they go "ewwww, yuck..."
JB: If they notice it at all.
J.H.K.: I think they notice it. And I think they are quite justified in feeling that way. But the outward appearance of our landscape is just a manifestation of deeper problems. And I wanted to find out what they are.
We once had a sense of a community as a functioning, living organism, made up of many other functioning, living things. It's places where people live, where people do business, where people enjoy public gatherings - all these places that used to comprise our civic life.
When we look at these gruesome highway strips and go "yuck" and "bleah,' and our stomachs turn, what it finally comes down to is an apprehension that we have thrown our civic life away, and that's what people feel.
JB: And do you blame the automobile for that loss?
J.H.K.: The automobile has played a very large part in that destructive process, but it's not the only thing. There have been some reviews of the book that have suggested that it is only about the effects of the automobile on the landscape, and that's not true.
(He pauses for a moment, takes a sip of ice tea, gathers his thoughts.)
The troubled townscapes and landscapes that we have created are manifestations of our economic predicament. We have come to the end of a 50-year-long, abnormal war-time boom economy. First it was the hot war economy, WWII, Korea, and Vietnam, and in between it was the Cold War economy.
From 1945 until the early 70's we could sell any product that we made to any country in the world, because after WWII all the advanced nations were either bankrupt or bombed into ruins.
Japan and Germany weren't going to try selling us cars in the 1950s. But then other countries started to catch up, and in the mid-'70s the Japanese started to successfully compete against our biggest industry: the car industry. Now, the industrial jobs that gave our workers the highest standard of living in the
world are simply gone, and they're not coming back.
So the economy we face in the next 50 years is not going to be the same as it was for the past 50. It is not going to be based on people driving around to the malls buying Guns and Roses posters and plastic trolls.
JB: But how was the "destruction of our civic life," as you put it, the consequence of that boom?
J.H.K.: Unintended consequences. One of the great tragedies of our times is that the great bustling middle class - that used to be out in the public realm fomenting ideas and meeting each other and being involved in cultural life - are the ones who abandoned the cities and are locked in their suburban houses.
The analogue to that is the way we have eliminated the merchant classes from our towns. This has been a great tragedy, because the merchants in small towns and in cities were the people who supported all the civic institutions. They were the people who sat on the library boards and on the school boards, and sponsored the little league teams. We threw them into the garbage cans so we could have K-Marts, where we could buy a microwave oven for $9 less than we would have been charged in a locally-owned store.
People are paying $9 less for their microwave oven, but they're losing a lot more than $9 in public amenity in the process.
JB: How did that happen?
J.H.K.: Mass merchandising in America came about because we have cheap transportation. Truckers pay less for gas in America than they do anywhere else in the world, period. As long as that's the case, you can have huge mass-merchandising corporations that can rationalize their operation. You can't do that in Italy, where gas is $4.50 a gallon and it costs $30 in tolls to drive
100 miles. You couldn't be trucking around 5 tons of trolls every day if the government didn't subsidize the highway system.
I'm not saying this was even avoidable. But what I think is really pathetic is the way people in the towns behaved contrary to their best interests. All the little Rotary Club boosters would do everything they could to get the K-Mart to come to town, and then they would stand there scratching their heads when all their fellow small-businessmen went out of business.
We see this in Saratoga. In 1974 they had a special supplement in the Sunday newspaper that was put together by the Rotary Club, the Chamber of Commerce, promoting the hell out of the new Pyramid Mall that was about to open here, and what a wonderful thing it was going to be, and what a wonderful adjunct to downtown Saratoga it was going to be. Well, 98 percent of the stores that existed in downtown Saratoga when the mall opened are gone now.
JB: In "The Geography of Nowhere," you take an in-depth look at the destruction of mass transit in this country, and the corollary that Detroit was given a chance to build smaller and more efficient cars when the oil embargo hit in 1973 with the oil embargo, and basically...
J.H.K.: They blew it.
JB: Or didn't see the possibility that things would change. We tend to look at the life we have, the economic environment we have as being inevitable, a "natural order"....
J.H.K.: Or maybe people are like fish, they don't question the water that they swim in. Our everyday environment is the water that we swim in.
JB: But in fact there were several economic choices that were made that could have gone a different way, with different results. For example, greater reliance on alternate fuels, or electric cars....
J.H.K.: Changing the fueling of the cars isn't going to help the trouble we have with the way places and people relate; it's only going to make the problems worse.
The question really isn't whether we're going to have solar cars, electric cars, propane cars - look, we're going to continue to have cars, I've been misquoted in some newspaper reviews as having said that the automobile is going to disappear; I never said anything of the kind. I do think we're going to have less automobiles in the future, and fewer people are going to be able to own them.
But to try to solve the problem by inventing a different kind of automobile is not going to happen, and it's not going to work, so we might as well forget it. We can get a lot more value out of redesigning the human habitat to get places that are worth living in, without having to redesign the automobile. No amount of redesigning the automobile will give us our civic life back.
JB: You comment in the book about Greenfield Villlage, Henry Ford's "old time Main Street U.S.A." park, and the fact that people visiting there like it very much, but can't quite put their fingers on why it feels good. Americans seem to instinctively like the old Main Street with its shops - and no parking lots full of cars - but somehow, it's not what we ended up with.
J.H.K.: People know what they like, know how to make a good town. The problem right now is that their instincts and their longings are in direct opposition to their building practices, laws and regulations.
JB: In the book, you talk about zoning as a prime villain....
J.H.K.: We invented zoning at the turn of the century, and it was a good idea - that all these factories and their noxious pollutants should go to their own part of the city and be dirty and smelly and noisy over there where they won't harm property values.
JB: Maybe this points a finger at one of the roots of our trouble: rather than deal with a problem, we've tended to just put it somewhere else and pretend it's not there. "Out of sight, out of mind;" put all the obnoxious activities where they'll bother someone else.
J.H.K.: And after WWII we decided that shopping was also an obnoxious activity and we weren't going to let people live around shopping either.
Zoning created the strip mall - which was an obnoxious place to shop. For 5,000 years people built their towns in a different way: You had stores on the first floor, and you had other activities up above; people living, offices, other activities all mixed together. That is the basic pattern for the basic American small town, and it's not a bad pattern. The ironic thing is, people wonder why small towns don't feel like small towns anymore - it's because their laws tell them they can't build them like small towns.
If you look around America, you will notice a curious thing: Every strip mall is one story high. We have an affordable housing crisis in this country, and one of the reasons for that is that we haven't been building any cheap housing for 50 years. We haven't been building any houses over stores.
The only kind of housing we've allowed people to build, for the most part are single family dwellings.
JB: But where did that idea come from, that it's "inhumane" to let people live over stores?
J.H.K.: I don't know. I do think it's funny that we think it's inhumane to allow people to live over a plant store. We also think its inhumane to have grocery stores in housing developments. I don't think I've ever seen a housing development in America that actually has a corner store right in the
development. And most of the people would probably greet the idea with loathing at first glance.
JB: But that makes sense - as you point out, the set-back requirements and lighting requirements would drop that corner store into the middle of a sea of asphalt and all-night mercury-vapor lighting; not exactly a pleasant neighbor.
J.H.K.: But you shouldn't have to have the mercury-vapor lights; you could even live without the parking lot. We have corner stores in the old neighborhoods in Saratoga, and they don't have parking lots, and they function very well, the people who operate them seem to be able to make a decent living. So it can be done. It's a matter of changing the zoning.
JB: In the book, you mentioned one strip mall in the Massachusetts town of Mashpee that had been converted into more of a "town center" sort of place....
J.H.K.: Yes. they took this one-story strip-mall with its sea of asphalt and built apartments on the second floor, took the parking lot and turned it into a street by putting stuff on the other side of it, and infilling it.
By observing a few good rules of urbanism, they took a place that looks like nowhere and turned it into a place that looks like somewhere.
JB: What rules are those?
J.H.K.: Well, for example, in order for a place to have any civic vitality, any life, it really helps if you have people living there. You go to a strip mall at night and it's a dead place; you go to a live downtown at night, like Saratoga, and there are people around. There are shops on the ground floor, they come out to the sidewalk - the rules are really simple. The trouble is they've been zoned out of existence, except in places that are essentially antiques.
JB: Like Woodstock, Vermont.
J.H.K.: Yeah, or any of the places I've mentioned in the book. You go to Georgetown (D.C.) and Beacon Hill (Boston), and people like to be in those places. They recognize the good relationships between things, instinctively. They know that they feel a sense of community there because they can see how nice it would be to be able to walk down that flight of stairs and out onto the street and buy a newspaper, and then go back for breakfast, or go down the street to a corner tavern and have a beer, or actually know the person that you are buying your meat from.
The other way of living is artificial, created by accident, by zoning and government policies, and as long as it's economically feasible for people to maintain this status quo, they are going to. My point is that it isn't going to be economically feasible much longer, because of the hidden costs.
Something that no one seems to think about: Every little town and hamlet in America has to bear the expense of operating a mass transit line that runs only twice a day, and only for people under 18. It's called "a school bus fleet." The costs of these things are immense - we're talking about millions of dollars for every small town in the country. And they sit around most of the day.
The tragic thing is, there's no reason on earth that they couldn't use some of those vehicles the rest of the day for public transport, but they don't. We need to rethink some of these "settled" issues. We're going to have to unsettle them, or we're never going to have decent towns in America.
When Robert Moses built his highway out to Jones Beach in the 1920s, he made the overpasses too short for busses to get under, because he didn't want that class of people coming out to Jones Beach. He wanted only the people who could afford cars - in short, he was a snob.
We do an interesting thing in this country. We pretend that we're the most egalitarian country on Earth. And yet, no other country segregates its people and its activities by category as rigidly as we do. People who make less than $12,000 must live in this concrete can we call public housing; We can't have any shopping or any places where people work around places where they live. So everything is disconnected.
That's not the way it used to be, when poor people lived right around the corner, or right upstairs, from middle-class people, when all the children walked to school together and played together.
We pay a lot of lip service to being a democracy, but when it comes down to the nuts and bolts of it, we really don't allow democracy to exist.
We don't want to live around people who are different. Forget racism - even white people don't want to live around white people who make less money than they do.
JB: One of the standard arguments against the kind of planning that you advocate is that "Americans won't stand for that kind of government interference in business and private property". But you seem to be saying that, in fact, most of the current situation is precisely because of government interference in business decisions, from zoning restrictions to FHA- subsidizing suburban tract-housing and government-subsidizing highways.
J.H.K.: Absolutely. And a few people have benefitted from, for instance, the government giving them insurance on their beach houses.
I had an interview with a very interesting man named John DeGrove, who is a professor at Florida Atlantic University and a major player in the revolutionary new land-planning stuff that's going on down there - They now have what is called a concurrency law, which requires the developers to do all the infrastructure work before they put in the development, so they can't just plop the houses down and then say to the county, "Okay, here's 7,000 new people, build schools for them." Now the developers have to do that, put in sewer lines, and do all the other things that were bankrupting municipalities. And as a consequence you don't have the same kind of development you had before.
The government has not only subsidized a lot of bad building, it has subsidized bad ideas about building.
JB: So, as long as there is still money to be made, what's going to change that?
J.H.K.: It's changing already. The Federal government is bankrupt. The chickens are coming home to roost now. We've out $500 billion from the savings and loan debacle; we're out several billion dollars from Hurricane Andrew, and that's probably just the first of many high-price disasters we're going to suffer in the decade ahead.
In an economy with less money sloshing around, it's not going to be possible to say "Go ahead, build your development on the beach, if anything goes wrong the government will pay for it again." So far we've postponed the reckoning by rolling over the debt. But we can't keep doing it forever.
JB: And yet you are not - despite what some critics have said - a "zero-growth" advocate either.
J.H.K.: The question is not whether we're going to have development or not - we're going to have it. But the development issues of the next decade are going to be different.
What we have been doing in America has been to take the functions of town life and smearing them all over the countryside. This has two consequences: It ruins the countryside, and it impairs and damages the life of our towns.
I think of development in a different way. A town is like an organism: it grows or it dies. The question is, HOW does it grow. Where does the development belong? And we're going to have to rethink that question.
The towns that people like best are the towns that are pedestrian-oriented, but we have built an infrastructure that will only serve motorists. When we discover that our life, based on motoring, is bankrupting us, we are going to build a different kind of environment.
His weekly posts at Clusterfuck Nation are must-reads for anyone who is worried about the current state of America and the world - that is, anyone who has been paying attention.
What's scary about this interview is: It's from 13 years ago. And nothing has changed - the situation has only gotten more critical.
James Howard Kunstler and
The Geography of Nowhere.
Interview with Jeremy Bloom
"Eighty percent of everything ever built in America has been built in the last fifty years, and most of it is depressing, brutal, ugly, unhealthy, and spiritually degrading...."Thus, James Howard ("Jimmy") Kunstler begins his new volume, "The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-made Landscape." A pithy, gutsy volume that pulls no punches, "Nowhere" develops the idea that the lack of community we feel in America today is, in large measure, because we have failed to build communities.
By looking at how our towns and cities grew - from Long Island to Detroit to Disneyland - Kunstler is doing more than the proverbial "talking about the weather" of our urban environment; he is attempting to do something about it. He points out what he thinks are the mistakes that were made, and also looks to the future with some hopeful changes, some of which are already in motion. It's an important issue: important enough that "The New York Times" has run reviews of "The Geography of Nowhere" in both the Book Review and the regular daily Times, as well as running an Op-ed Page piece by Kunstler.
We chatted with him on a warm summer day, sitting on the wide, carnival-painted porch of his Victorian Saratoga Springs house. Holding a glass of frosty iced tea in one hand, he contemplates the cover of "The Geography of Nowhere," with its pictured vista of Long Island's suburban sprawl.
J.H.K.: I wanted to call the book "Why America is So Fucking Ugly," but my publisher and I settled on "The Geography of Nowhere"
(There's more...)
JB: So we're nowhere, and it's ugly. How did we get here?
J.H.K.: We had an incredible imperial boom from to '50s to the '70s. The Interstate Highway System was going up, everyone was getting a new house with an FHA mortgage. People were making money off this stuff and the horizon seemed limitless. Very few people were thinking of the consequences - and particularly the unforseen repercussions, the hidden costs.
We have done incredible damage to our culture, to our spiritual life in this country, and our civic life. To any notion of the common good.
It boils down to this: we build too many places that are not worth caring about, and we've destroyed our civic life in the process. If we're going to continue to be a viable civilization, we're going to have to build places we can care about - and if we do that, we will enjoy civic life once again.
All these things may seem to be abstractions, but they are no more abstract than, for instance, the concept of justice - which is very important to Americans.
There are some ideals that we are going to have to pay attention to that are different from the ones we've been looking at over the last 20 years.
JB: But this is very abstract and complex: we're talking here of a juxtaposition of questions of natural law, aesthetics, as well as questions of efficiency and economics questions....
J.H.K.: Most people think of this problem only in terms of aesthetics. They drive down some gruesome commercial strip like Central Avenue in Albany, and they go "ewwww, yuck..."
JB: If they notice it at all.
J.H.K.: I think they notice it. And I think they are quite justified in feeling that way. But the outward appearance of our landscape is just a manifestation of deeper problems. And I wanted to find out what they are.
We once had a sense of a community as a functioning, living organism, made up of many other functioning, living things. It's places where people live, where people do business, where people enjoy public gatherings - all these places that used to comprise our civic life.
When we look at these gruesome highway strips and go "yuck" and "bleah,' and our stomachs turn, what it finally comes down to is an apprehension that we have thrown our civic life away, and that's what people feel.
JB: And do you blame the automobile for that loss?
J.H.K.: The automobile has played a very large part in that destructive process, but it's not the only thing. There have been some reviews of the book that have suggested that it is only about the effects of the automobile on the landscape, and that's not true.
(He pauses for a moment, takes a sip of ice tea, gathers his thoughts.)
The troubled townscapes and landscapes that we have created are manifestations of our economic predicament. We have come to the end of a 50-year-long, abnormal war-time boom economy. First it was the hot war economy, WWII, Korea, and Vietnam, and in between it was the Cold War economy.
From 1945 until the early 70's we could sell any product that we made to any country in the world, because after WWII all the advanced nations were either bankrupt or bombed into ruins.
Japan and Germany weren't going to try selling us cars in the 1950s. But then other countries started to catch up, and in the mid-'70s the Japanese started to successfully compete against our biggest industry: the car industry. Now, the industrial jobs that gave our workers the highest standard of living in the
world are simply gone, and they're not coming back.
So the economy we face in the next 50 years is not going to be the same as it was for the past 50. It is not going to be based on people driving around to the malls buying Guns and Roses posters and plastic trolls.
JB: But how was the "destruction of our civic life," as you put it, the consequence of that boom?
J.H.K.: Unintended consequences. One of the great tragedies of our times is that the great bustling middle class - that used to be out in the public realm fomenting ideas and meeting each other and being involved in cultural life - are the ones who abandoned the cities and are locked in their suburban houses.
The analogue to that is the way we have eliminated the merchant classes from our towns. This has been a great tragedy, because the merchants in small towns and in cities were the people who supported all the civic institutions. They were the people who sat on the library boards and on the school boards, and sponsored the little league teams. We threw them into the garbage cans so we could have K-Marts, where we could buy a microwave oven for $9 less than we would have been charged in a locally-owned store.
People are paying $9 less for their microwave oven, but they're losing a lot more than $9 in public amenity in the process.
JB: How did that happen?
J.H.K.: Mass merchandising in America came about because we have cheap transportation. Truckers pay less for gas in America than they do anywhere else in the world, period. As long as that's the case, you can have huge mass-merchandising corporations that can rationalize their operation. You can't do that in Italy, where gas is $4.50 a gallon and it costs $30 in tolls to drive
100 miles. You couldn't be trucking around 5 tons of trolls every day if the government didn't subsidize the highway system.
I'm not saying this was even avoidable. But what I think is really pathetic is the way people in the towns behaved contrary to their best interests. All the little Rotary Club boosters would do everything they could to get the K-Mart to come to town, and then they would stand there scratching their heads when all their fellow small-businessmen went out of business.
We see this in Saratoga. In 1974 they had a special supplement in the Sunday newspaper that was put together by the Rotary Club, the Chamber of Commerce, promoting the hell out of the new Pyramid Mall that was about to open here, and what a wonderful thing it was going to be, and what a wonderful adjunct to downtown Saratoga it was going to be. Well, 98 percent of the stores that existed in downtown Saratoga when the mall opened are gone now.
JB: In "The Geography of Nowhere," you take an in-depth look at the destruction of mass transit in this country, and the corollary that Detroit was given a chance to build smaller and more efficient cars when the oil embargo hit in 1973 with the oil embargo, and basically...
J.H.K.: They blew it.
JB: Or didn't see the possibility that things would change. We tend to look at the life we have, the economic environment we have as being inevitable, a "natural order"....
J.H.K.: Or maybe people are like fish, they don't question the water that they swim in. Our everyday environment is the water that we swim in.
JB: But in fact there were several economic choices that were made that could have gone a different way, with different results. For example, greater reliance on alternate fuels, or electric cars....
J.H.K.: Changing the fueling of the cars isn't going to help the trouble we have with the way places and people relate; it's only going to make the problems worse.
The question really isn't whether we're going to have solar cars, electric cars, propane cars - look, we're going to continue to have cars, I've been misquoted in some newspaper reviews as having said that the automobile is going to disappear; I never said anything of the kind. I do think we're going to have less automobiles in the future, and fewer people are going to be able to own them.
But to try to solve the problem by inventing a different kind of automobile is not going to happen, and it's not going to work, so we might as well forget it. We can get a lot more value out of redesigning the human habitat to get places that are worth living in, without having to redesign the automobile. No amount of redesigning the automobile will give us our civic life back.
JB: You comment in the book about Greenfield Villlage, Henry Ford's "old time Main Street U.S.A." park, and the fact that people visiting there like it very much, but can't quite put their fingers on why it feels good. Americans seem to instinctively like the old Main Street with its shops - and no parking lots full of cars - but somehow, it's not what we ended up with.
J.H.K.: People know what they like, know how to make a good town. The problem right now is that their instincts and their longings are in direct opposition to their building practices, laws and regulations.
JB: In the book, you talk about zoning as a prime villain....
J.H.K.: We invented zoning at the turn of the century, and it was a good idea - that all these factories and their noxious pollutants should go to their own part of the city and be dirty and smelly and noisy over there where they won't harm property values.
JB: Maybe this points a finger at one of the roots of our trouble: rather than deal with a problem, we've tended to just put it somewhere else and pretend it's not there. "Out of sight, out of mind;" put all the obnoxious activities where they'll bother someone else.
J.H.K.: And after WWII we decided that shopping was also an obnoxious activity and we weren't going to let people live around shopping either.
Zoning created the strip mall - which was an obnoxious place to shop. For 5,000 years people built their towns in a different way: You had stores on the first floor, and you had other activities up above; people living, offices, other activities all mixed together. That is the basic pattern for the basic American small town, and it's not a bad pattern. The ironic thing is, people wonder why small towns don't feel like small towns anymore - it's because their laws tell them they can't build them like small towns.
If you look around America, you will notice a curious thing: Every strip mall is one story high. We have an affordable housing crisis in this country, and one of the reasons for that is that we haven't been building any cheap housing for 50 years. We haven't been building any houses over stores.
The only kind of housing we've allowed people to build, for the most part are single family dwellings.
JB: But where did that idea come from, that it's "inhumane" to let people live over stores?
J.H.K.: I don't know. I do think it's funny that we think it's inhumane to allow people to live over a plant store. We also think its inhumane to have grocery stores in housing developments. I don't think I've ever seen a housing development in America that actually has a corner store right in the
development. And most of the people would probably greet the idea with loathing at first glance.
JB: But that makes sense - as you point out, the set-back requirements and lighting requirements would drop that corner store into the middle of a sea of asphalt and all-night mercury-vapor lighting; not exactly a pleasant neighbor.
J.H.K.: But you shouldn't have to have the mercury-vapor lights; you could even live without the parking lot. We have corner stores in the old neighborhoods in Saratoga, and they don't have parking lots, and they function very well, the people who operate them seem to be able to make a decent living. So it can be done. It's a matter of changing the zoning.
JB: In the book, you mentioned one strip mall in the Massachusetts town of Mashpee that had been converted into more of a "town center" sort of place....
J.H.K.: Yes. they took this one-story strip-mall with its sea of asphalt and built apartments on the second floor, took the parking lot and turned it into a street by putting stuff on the other side of it, and infilling it.
By observing a few good rules of urbanism, they took a place that looks like nowhere and turned it into a place that looks like somewhere.
JB: What rules are those?
J.H.K.: Well, for example, in order for a place to have any civic vitality, any life, it really helps if you have people living there. You go to a strip mall at night and it's a dead place; you go to a live downtown at night, like Saratoga, and there are people around. There are shops on the ground floor, they come out to the sidewalk - the rules are really simple. The trouble is they've been zoned out of existence, except in places that are essentially antiques.
JB: Like Woodstock, Vermont.
J.H.K.: Yeah, or any of the places I've mentioned in the book. You go to Georgetown (D.C.) and Beacon Hill (Boston), and people like to be in those places. They recognize the good relationships between things, instinctively. They know that they feel a sense of community there because they can see how nice it would be to be able to walk down that flight of stairs and out onto the street and buy a newspaper, and then go back for breakfast, or go down the street to a corner tavern and have a beer, or actually know the person that you are buying your meat from.
The other way of living is artificial, created by accident, by zoning and government policies, and as long as it's economically feasible for people to maintain this status quo, they are going to. My point is that it isn't going to be economically feasible much longer, because of the hidden costs.
Something that no one seems to think about: Every little town and hamlet in America has to bear the expense of operating a mass transit line that runs only twice a day, and only for people under 18. It's called "a school bus fleet." The costs of these things are immense - we're talking about millions of dollars for every small town in the country. And they sit around most of the day.
The tragic thing is, there's no reason on earth that they couldn't use some of those vehicles the rest of the day for public transport, but they don't. We need to rethink some of these "settled" issues. We're going to have to unsettle them, or we're never going to have decent towns in America.
When Robert Moses built his highway out to Jones Beach in the 1920s, he made the overpasses too short for busses to get under, because he didn't want that class of people coming out to Jones Beach. He wanted only the people who could afford cars - in short, he was a snob.
We do an interesting thing in this country. We pretend that we're the most egalitarian country on Earth. And yet, no other country segregates its people and its activities by category as rigidly as we do. People who make less than $12,000 must live in this concrete can we call public housing; We can't have any shopping or any places where people work around places where they live. So everything is disconnected.
That's not the way it used to be, when poor people lived right around the corner, or right upstairs, from middle-class people, when all the children walked to school together and played together.
We pay a lot of lip service to being a democracy, but when it comes down to the nuts and bolts of it, we really don't allow democracy to exist.
We don't want to live around people who are different. Forget racism - even white people don't want to live around white people who make less money than they do.
JB: One of the standard arguments against the kind of planning that you advocate is that "Americans won't stand for that kind of government interference in business and private property". But you seem to be saying that, in fact, most of the current situation is precisely because of government interference in business decisions, from zoning restrictions to FHA- subsidizing suburban tract-housing and government-subsidizing highways.
J.H.K.: Absolutely. And a few people have benefitted from, for instance, the government giving them insurance on their beach houses.
I had an interview with a very interesting man named John DeGrove, who is a professor at Florida Atlantic University and a major player in the revolutionary new land-planning stuff that's going on down there - They now have what is called a concurrency law, which requires the developers to do all the infrastructure work before they put in the development, so they can't just plop the houses down and then say to the county, "Okay, here's 7,000 new people, build schools for them." Now the developers have to do that, put in sewer lines, and do all the other things that were bankrupting municipalities. And as a consequence you don't have the same kind of development you had before.
The government has not only subsidized a lot of bad building, it has subsidized bad ideas about building.
JB: So, as long as there is still money to be made, what's going to change that?
J.H.K.: It's changing already. The Federal government is bankrupt. The chickens are coming home to roost now. We've out $500 billion from the savings and loan debacle; we're out several billion dollars from Hurricane Andrew, and that's probably just the first of many high-price disasters we're going to suffer in the decade ahead.
In an economy with less money sloshing around, it's not going to be possible to say "Go ahead, build your development on the beach, if anything goes wrong the government will pay for it again." So far we've postponed the reckoning by rolling over the debt. But we can't keep doing it forever.
JB: And yet you are not - despite what some critics have said - a "zero-growth" advocate either.
J.H.K.: The question is not whether we're going to have development or not - we're going to have it. But the development issues of the next decade are going to be different.
What we have been doing in America has been to take the functions of town life and smearing them all over the countryside. This has two consequences: It ruins the countryside, and it impairs and damages the life of our towns.
I think of development in a different way. A town is like an organism: it grows or it dies. The question is, HOW does it grow. Where does the development belong? And we're going to have to rethink that question.
The towns that people like best are the towns that are pedestrian-oriented, but we have built an infrastructure that will only serve motorists. When we discover that our life, based on motoring, is bankrupting us, we are going to build a different kind of environment.
Monday, January 28, 2008
Battered Eagles
(Originally printed in the Powell River Peak)
After two weeks in rehabilitation at the Mountainaire Avian Rescue Society in Courtenay, a wayward bald eagle was returned to Texada Island and released.
John Whitehead found the eagle on his property in the Oasis area north of Gillies Bay. "There were a few eagles hanging around in the area before Christmas," he said. "When I got home after Christmas I found this one in the backyard, hopping around, unable to fly."
(There's more...)
He said he called the Powell River conservation officer service, but was told there were no officers available in the area, and he should try the Powell River SPCA. He contacted volunteer branch manager Audrey Hill, who quickly arranged for local volunteers to get there with a transport cage.
"I was right on the scene," said volunteer Micheline Macauley. "I live right next door."
Joined by volunteers Cheryl Nyl and Elaine Purgavie, Macauley and Whitehead set about the daunting task of capturing a bald eagle.
"It wasn't easy," said Whitehead. "We got a blanket over him, and got a hold of his talons. But even though he was wrapped in the blanket his head was still out, and I didn't know if I was going to get an eye pecked out. I got my coat off and over his head, and we got him into the kennel. He wasn't happy, but he didn't get overly excited."
After a preliminary examination by local veterinarian Dr. Brian Barnes, of Westview Veterinary Hospital, BC Ferries gave the eagle a free ride to the Mountainaire Avian Rescue Society.
Mary Jane Birch, wildlife rehabilitator and manager of the society, said fortunately, there were only minor injuries. "There were no broken bones or major lacerations," she said. "But he was thin and wet and cold, and was found down on the ground, so that's never a good sign."
She said it was possible that the eagle may have fought with another eagle, as winter is hard on all wildlife, with strong winds, harsh weather and disrupted food supply. "There's competition over food, over territory and mates," she said. "We gave him lots of food, vitamins, and some rest and relaxation. That seems to have done it."
After two more free ferry rides on Tuesday, January 22, the bird was returned to Whitehead's property and released.
"He hopped right out," Macauley said. "He looked around, flew up into a low tree and rested for a bit. Then he just took off. It was beautiful to see."
Hill said this is the fourth eagle the SPCA has assisted this winter, which is unusual. "We've had about nine eagles in the 14 years I've been here." she said. "We captured one on Savary Island two weeks ago, but he was too badly injured, probably by the storm, and didn't make it."
Sunday, January 27, 2008
Fries With That
(Originally published in the Powell River Peak)
When inventor Rudolf Diesel demonstrated his distinctive engine in the early years of the 20th century, it ran on peanut oil, not petroleum.
It took nearly 100 years, but local resident Kevin Egan said he is part of a worldwide movement to return to the original plan for the diesel engine, and switch over from fossil fuels to sustainable fuels.
He pointed out that local restaurants treat used vegetable oil as a messy waste product. "The restaurants are paying people to get rid of it, and the resources to haul it away are wasted," he said. "Instead, we could be using it as fuel."
(There's more...)
Egan, whose background is in organic chemistry and petroleum technology, worked for years for Shaw Cable. But a year ago he had neck surgery to fuse three vertebrae and he's been out on disability leave.
He has taken his free time to help others by assisting them in converting their vehicles. "It's not that difficult to switch a standard diesel vehicle over to run on pure veggie oil," he said. "You can hire somebody to do it for you, and that will cost around $3,000. Or you can do it yourself for less than $1,000, with all the little extras and bits. And if you're prepared, you can do the whole thing in one day."
Egan cautioned against confusing vegetable oil and biodiesel, which are two different things. "Biodiesel is oil that has been transesterified," he said. "That requires a lot of work and some messy chemicals, and it's too much for an individual to handle in most cases. With veggie oil, you can run it straight out of the fryer. You just have to filter out food particles and remove any water that got in from cooking."
He noted that it takes about 15 minutes to filter a 55-gallon drum. "That's about 250 litres," he said. "I've been getting it for free from local restaurants, since they'd have to pay to have it disposed of. What would that much diesel fuel cost at current prices?"
He sets up the vehicles with two tanks, one for diesel and one for vegetable oil. He said that cars cold-start better on standard diesel, and it's also good to have an auxiliary system if people using the system are on the road and vegetable oil is not available. "We have two full-size, four-wheel-drive Mitsubishi Delicas that we imported from Japan, and our family goes through more milk in a week than diesel," he said. "I'd say that's pretty good."
Egan said that diesel cars have not been offered for sale in the United States and Canada because of emissions concerns, although diesel pickups are available. Mercedes and Volkswagen produce diesel models, and various Japanese companies make diesel cars for their own domestic market, like the Delicas he imported. Egan estimates that about one in 20 vehicles in Powell River run on diesel. "And we have enough veggie oils being wasted here, now, to power those vehicles," he said.
Another advantage, he added, is that vegetable oils are much more stable than petroleum fuels. "You can take a big drum and carry it in the back of your van," he said. "It doesn't smell bad, and it can't blow up."
Via word of mouth and computer bulletin boards, Egan has helped people with conversions in other parts of BC, from Campbell River to Kelowna. "I'd like to do some in Powell River," he said. "I'm talking with a couple of people, and I may be helping the automotive class at Brooks Secondary School convert a Mercedes diesel over to veggie. This is the best form of community-oriented recycling, reusing things locally, saving resources and money."
Anyone interested in having Egan convert a vehicle can email him at veggievan (at) shaw (dot)ca.
Saturday, January 26, 2008
Jared Diamond on Sustainability
Jared Daimond, author of "Guns, Germs and Steel" and the recent "Collapse", has a great article on consumption vs sustainability.
Worth reading the whole thing...
The population especially of the developing world is growing, and some people remain fixated on this. They note that populations of countries like Kenya are growing rapidly, and they say that's a big problem. Yes, it is a problem for Kenya's more than 30 million people, but it's not a burden on the whole world, because Kenyans consume so little. (Their relative per capita rate is 1.) A real problem for the world is that each of us 300 million Americans consumes as much as 32 Kenyans. With 10 times the population, the United States consumes 320 times more resources than Kenya does.His conclusion? Because we waste so much, we can actually maintain a fair amount of our current lifestyle while bringing our consumption factor down by at least half.
Worth reading the whole thing...
Thursday, January 24, 2008
Powell River: Student Action
(Originally published in the Powell River Peak)Some people look at the trash from a construction project and shrug. Others sigh about the waste.
Ryan Barfoot, sustainability and eco-education coordinator for School District 47, looked at the scrap wood being generated by the reconstruction project at Brooks Secondary School and saw an opportunity.
Edgehill Elementary School staff approached him for help with their Dream Streams project, an environmental display of large wooden salmon to decorate the school. They needed help and materials, and thought that Students for Environmental Awareness (SEA), a student group he runs at Brooks, might want to become involved.
"Instead of seeking new material, we're using the scrap wood," he said. "They get their artwork, and there's less waste going into the landfill. It's a full-circle and holistic approach, and everybody benefits."
More than that, the group is moving beyond Edgehill's original plan, said grade 10 student Katherine Boucher. "We're going to do a dramatic presentation about salmon streams, the importance of salmon and habitat."
Barfoot said that this is only one little project, but it's involving hundreds of students overall. "For Edgehill, it started as an art project," he said. "We're helping them do it in a full way, with a deeper dimension of education and mentorship, with my students mentoring their young students."
Added grade 12 student Erika Davies, "we're learning by teaching, which is cool."
(More...)
Barfoot said the teens of SEA are young, but they are both enthusiastic and knowledgeable when talking about cutting-edge subjects such as sustainability and smart development.
Erika said the group is working on an ecological footprint presentation. "We're going to present this around the school," she said. "It's important for students to know how much of the world's resources they're using, and how they can reduce that."
That's a general goal, but they also work on concrete projects, such as getting the school to use more recycled paper. "The problem there is that recycled paper costs more," said grade 12 student Kayle Wilson. "We're looking at doing a fundraiser to help cover the difference."
And grade 10 student Mackenzie Adamson is looking to the end of the year for a paper-related, tie-in project. "There's tons of paper thrown out when school is over," he said. "Maybe we'll have a huge recycling bin and do it as a fundraiser."
The SEA students worked with Canada World Youth to clean up the beach at Tla'Amin (Sliammon) First Nation, and circulated petitions opposing the liquefied natural gas plant on Texada Island.
While the group only has 21 members so far, Katherine said she thinks they're making an impact. "We're spreading the word," she said. "We talk to our friends, and they inform their friends, and it gets out there."
The school district is looking to be carbon-neutral by 2010. This means balancing carbon emissions and power usage with sustainable alternative energy. The group is looking at ways of helping that along, including replacing all light bulbs in the school with more efficient models.
Katherine said she'd like to start a greenhouse in the back of the school. "We could do more composting, too," she said.
Beyond that, Erika said she believes youth need to have more of a say in what goes on in the world. "We should have more of a voice in the community sustainability charter," she said. "People make plans, but they only ask what the current generation thinks."
"We're the ones who are going to have to live with the consequences," Kayle added.
"We want action," Katherine said. "They use a lot of words like hope and desire, but there's not much on action and taking charge."
The group meets a couple of times a month, generally at lunchtime on Thursdays, and more frequently when they're working on a big project. Sometimes, Barfoot said, they just take a break and get out into the outdoors.
"I think that's what fuels people," he said. "Without having direct experience of the environment, it's hard to embrace."
Wednesday, January 16, 2008
The Challenge of Wellness
(Originally published in the Powell River Peak)One of the challenges of the human condition is that we all seek our personal paradise - a good job, a good relationship and a good home in a good community. And then we want to stay there.
But time has its way, and we don't get to stop when we get where we want to be. Like Alice's Red Queen, we have to run as fast as we can just to stay in one place.
(There's more...)
How do we stay well? As presented at last weekend's Live Well: A Night Celebrating Wellness event at Brooks Secondary School, wellness is a lot more than not being sick. Author Brian Luke Seaward spoke about being a whole person - whole in mind, whole in body and whole in spirit.
That takes good food. Folks who would never think of pumping trash gas into the tank of their vehicle often forget that their body needs prime fuel as well.
Malaspina University-College professor Les Malbon talked about the 50-mile diet, and how much better it is to eat whole foods that are fresh and local. It's not good when food is trucked in from a factory farm 1,000 kilometres away, or from Chile or China. It may be cheaper, but the food is less nutritious, less flavourful, and may be tainted with toxins. And it devalues local farms.
Malbon pointed out that since 2001, more than 30 per cent of the agricultural land around Nanaimo has been lost to development. As Powell River looks to sustainably manage growth at the Saturday, January 19 community sustainability charter meeting, it's worth considering that the original meaning of the word paradise was orchard. Do we want more orchards, or more parking lots?
When wellness program organizer Jim Palm called Dr. Jeanne Paul to invite her to speak at Brooks, she told him she had been to Brooks before--for one day. It was 1951, when there was a deep well of prejudice against first nations peoples, and Paul was taken from Tla'Amin (Sliammon) First Nation and sent to boarding school.
Now, half a century later, Paul was a featured speaker, and other first nations participants were integral to the program. It was a testament to the way the non-aboriginal communities and first nations communities are building together to achieve a true regional wellness.
For the community, wellness is about integrating all the individuals into a coherent whole. That doesn't mean groupthink or hive mind, but healthy interactions, free of prejudice, coercion and fear.
Seaward emphasized how humour and humility are central to that, and author-educator Chris Bratseth put the spotlight on kindness. Small acts of daily kindness are the food that grows healthy communities.
Eagle Walz, who was also honoured on the weekend, has done an immeasurable amount of work on the Sunshine Coast Trail. He didn't do it for money, or even for the thanks of strangers who hike those trails, never knowing the man who helped make the trails possible. He did it because he lives here. He gets to enjoy them and so does everyone else.
Wellness multiplies wellness.
Tuesday, January 15, 2008
90 mpg from a Hummer? Dang...
We could cut our fuel use by more than 50 percent just by revamping our cars. This guy is a miracle worker...
Read the whole article... or watch an interview:
Check it out. It's actually a jet engine," says Johnathan Goodwin, with a low whistle. "This thing is gonna be even cooler than I thought." We're hunched on the floor of Goodwin's gleaming workshop in Wichita, Kansas, surrounded by the shards of a wooden packing crate. Inside the wreckage sits his latest toy--a 1985-issue turbine engine originally designed for the military. It can spin at a blistering 60,000 rpm and burn almost any fuel. And Goodwin has some startling plans for this esoteric piece of hardware: He's going to use it to create the most fuel-efficient Hummer in history.
Read the whole article... or watch an interview:
Saturday, October 27, 2007
Arctic Sea Ice Collapse
If you haven't seen this yet, you probably don't understand.
Global Warming isn't something we can casually mess around with. Climate systems are incredibly complex, and can suffer massive shifts with a suddenness that takes your breath away.
Watch the video. Watch what happens to the sea ice. Keep in mind that this amount of melting has never happened within living memory, nor within thousands of years.
And we really have no idea how it will affect other things - like the Gulf Stream current that keeps Europe mild and habitable, or the wider ocean currents that provide food for our fish stocks, or the weather patterns that give us rainfall that waters our crops and provides us with drinking water.
We have no idea how bad it can get, or how fast.
Global Warming isn't something we can casually mess around with. Climate systems are incredibly complex, and can suffer massive shifts with a suddenness that takes your breath away.
Watch the video. Watch what happens to the sea ice. Keep in mind that this amount of melting has never happened within living memory, nor within thousands of years.
And we really have no idea how it will affect other things - like the Gulf Stream current that keeps Europe mild and habitable, or the wider ocean currents that provide food for our fish stocks, or the weather patterns that give us rainfall that waters our crops and provides us with drinking water.
We have no idea how bad it can get, or how fast.
Friday, October 26, 2007
The Cutting Edge is Green
(Published in Luxury Life & Style)
Living on the cutting edge is the ultimate luxury.
And in building, the cutting edge is green.
Some things, it takes a while before the mainstream catches up. For a while - years, even - they remain the purview of the cranks and the hobbyists, folks who dump every spare minute and every spare dime into their crazy projects – and if you aren't lucky, they’ll tell you all about it until your eyes glazed over.
The automobile was like that, until Henry Ford made the it available for everyone. And these days we just take cars for granted.
It’s the same with green building. From the time just a few years ago when it was a specialized field that only a few people were interested in, it’s now exploding into the popular consciousness… and onto the landscape.
(More...)
“People are starting to demand this of the marketplace,” notes architect Peter Barsuk of Hermosa Beach. A member of the Gensler firm in Santa Monica, Barsuk is a board member of the US Green Building Council’s Los Angeles Chapter, and was also involved in setting up Hermosa’s Energy Patnership.
“Ten to fifteen years ago,” he notes, “there were very few architects and contractors that were practicing green building. Nobody understood what it meant or what it was. And if you asked suppliers what materials went into their products, they wouldn’t even tell you.”
What has changed things? In part, it’s pocketbook – as energy costs have risen, people see the impact every month on their bills for heating and air conditioning. And as asthma rates skyrocket, people are thinking more about indoor air quality.
But it’s more than that.
“It may look like an extravagance, but really, it’s spending wisely,” says Peter DeMaria of DeMaria Design Associates and Logical Home in Manhattan Beach.
“Theres a stigma that for something that’s a luxury, somehow there’s waste. But you look at refined designs, like autos, these are as fine as can be. We’re seeing the same thing now that happened with the automobile, or with MP3 players - the market is starting to drive all these alternative materials.”
And there’s an incredible range of options now – so don’t worry if you’re more in the market for a Lexus than a Bentley. The principals apply whether you’re building your dream home, or simply sprucing up your current place.
One thing that’s easy to do, but terribly important for your health and that of your family, is cut out Volatile Organic Compounds, or VOCs. Toxic compounds like formaldehyde are commonly used in furniture, carpet, paint and other building products; we’ve learned that these substances leak out into the air of your home for years, damaging young lungs, and leading to asthma and other respiratory problems, especially in children.
Designer Sarah Bernard recalls, “I was working with a client who had learned that out-gassing from upholstery foam and furniture glue can cause birth defects. She was pregnant at the time, and we were bringing in a lot of furniture – well, that’s a pretty reasonable concern.”
What to do? She works with natural products – hardwoods, linen and wool aren’t processed with chemicals (although you should check for stain-proofing or flameproof coatings). Get furniture that uses staples instead of glue. “Sometimes it’s not even a matter of giving up something,” says Bernard, “but approaching things in a different way.”
And use low-VOC paints, which are now widely available.
“When you use a regular paint,” notes Bernard. “you fill the house with ‘new paint smell’ – those are the gasses being released. With low-VOC there’s minimal gasses, so minimal smell, which is nice for the home-owner. And at this point, there’s almost no price difference.”
VOCs are an issue in new construction, as well. Plywood is notorious for out-gassing formaldehyde into living space. And while there are companies now making VOC-free plywood, many architects are looking at wood as very “last century”.
Patrick Killen, of Studio9one2 in Hermosa, is one of them. “Why,” he asks, “do we build multi-million dollar homes with a material – wood – that expands and contracts with water, attracts termites and mold, and just doesn’t last?”
There are a variety of alternatives, including metal studs – used in commercial construction for years – and a variety of alternative cladding materials.
“Instead of using plywood,” says DeMaria, “we’re using Dens-Guard gold, by Pacific Materials. It’s gypsum-based. Mold proof! Great R value, easy to handle and easy to cut.... With all its benefits, you’ll see this being used more and more often, and then the price will drop.”
DeMaria is also involved in an exciting alternative form of construction – he’s got a residence going up in Hermosa Beach based around four steel shipping containers.
“It’s just an extension of modular construction, really,” he says.
Even so, they had a hard time getting the design approved – it can be tricky, working on the bleeding edge this way - but he thinks it’s a great demonstration project.
“We found this amazing spray-on insulation, SuperTherm. It was used on the space shuttle, the coating is the thickness of a credit card, but has an amazing R value – R30. And at just $1.50 sq ft, it’s not that much more expensive. But in order to get our title 24 report approved, we had to work directly with the State Energy Commission. We must have spent at least 40 hours on the phone. They had never seen anything like this stuff before.”
Several designers are working with prefabricated living spaces, including DeMaria, who is launching a separate firm to deal with prefab. Another is Jennifer Siegal, whose DesignMobile firm is in the development stages to put one of her Swell houses in Manhattan Beach.
“Swell House gets assembled like Legos at your dream spot,” she notes, “and features Biofiber (a recycled cabinet composite made from sunflower seeds), finishing material made from recycled newspapers, and "ply-boo" (renewable bamboo) flooring.”
And where a typical architect-designed residence can cost $400 to $500 per square foot, her Swell Houses go for $200.
Prefab is good for the big-picture environment: it minimizes wasted materials, and also cuts transportation costs (since both materials and workers go to one central location). And it’s great for the local neighborhood environment – instead of months of banging and dust and trucks coming and going, you get one easy delivery.
Another thing that’s hot right now: Tankless hot water heaters, both for new construction and for home upgrades.
“Instead of heating up hot water and then having it sit there, wasting energy, these units flash-heat the water as you need it,” explains James Meyer of LeanArch, a design and build firm with roots in Manhattan Beach. He’s been using these heaters in the South Bay houses he’s been building (including the home of LL&S publisher Todd Klawin). “You save energy, you never run out of hot water, plus you save a lot of space, which in the South Bay with its tiny lots makes a big impact.”
These may cost $600 to $900, instead of $250 for a conventional tank heater – but what’s it worth to add an extra 90 cubic feet of space to your house?
Another new feature is in-floor heating (well, its been in use since Roman Times, but not the way they do it today). Meyer loves to use in the South Bay because it again combines environmental friendliness with space savings.
“With forced air, you kill a lot of space with ductwork,” he notes. “Instead, we build radiant heating into pipes below the floor. Instead of howling fans blowing dry air throughout the house, along with dust, pollen and mold, you have a nice quiet system that puts heat out from the bottom up.”
DeMaria has it in his own home, and notes, “This pays a dividend in the long run. And your feet are warm! My youngest son is 2.5 years old, and he’s rolling around on the bamboo floor, happy as if he’s in the bathtub.”
You can use similar systems for pool heating. Rick White of California Solar has a couple of South-Bay projects that use solar absorption.
“We now have an in-deck system. At one project in Palos Verdes, we’re putting a heat-exchange system under the concrete of the tennis court. The concrete heats up, and we pull the heat off the surface, put it into a medium that then runs it around to the pool. It heats the pool AND cools the tennis court.”
The cost has come down - you can solar heat a pool for $4500-$5500 dollars. Typically that means the break-even point is just 2 to 3 years.
And of rooftop solar has changed in a big way, too.
“I now have solar panels that are terracotta colored, so they don’t stand out like big black panels,” says White. “We specialize in photovoltaic panels that are integrated into roofing tiles. Match the roof right in, so the look is totally integrated.”
Meyer has a project going up at 217 9th Street with a 3 KW array of photovoltaic panels. They cut back on power purchases, and they’re tied into the grid, so when you’re not using power during the day, you feed power back into the grid when you’re not using. Most architects are now working this sort of package into their new designs.
“We have a ways to go,” notes Killen. “We need to put the kind of effort into solar and wind that we put into marketing the iPod. Solar has been around since the ‘70s, so compared with the MP3, progress has been slow. Right now we have the beginnings of building a foundation, but we’re only scratching the surface.”
Almost as important as heating is cooling. At the container house, DeMaria has installed an industrial-sized 12-foot fan – made by the Big Ass Fan company (its mascot is a donkey).
“Air conditioning will suck up 70 percent of your electricity,” he says. “If you’ve got your building properly designed to take advantage of your prevailing winds, you don’t need AC. And the fan keeps everything inside cooled off. The blades are similar to what you’ll find on a helicopter, cast aluminum and aerodynamically correct. You could blow the dishes right off the table if you want to.”
James Meyer’s 9th Street project uses the entire back of the house, which is a three-story open stairwell, to create a stack effect, drawing air up from the ground floor and cooling the entire house.
Likewise, projections over the windows cut their exposure to direct sunlight, making a huge impact on the need for AC.
“The standard Modern design is a big glass box that didn’t pay any attention to appropriate site orientation,” notes Killian, “and had no overhangs to cut exposure of the sun to all that glass. We’re learning…”
Another way to cut the unwanted energy provided by the sun is going with a roofing material that’s light, rather than dark. It’s estimated that dark roofs can get up to 180 degrees on a sunny day; some of that heat leaks into the house, and the rest is radiated back out, heating up the neighborhood. Going light with roofing could cut summer urban temperatures by several degrees – and saving millions of dollars in AC costs.
If you want to go really green in a big way, the ultimate is a Green Roof. Instead of standard roofing material, you have a full environment built on top of the building, complete with soil, grass, trees and shrubs.
The firm of Marmol Radziner is doing one at a project overlooking the ocean in Palos Verdes, which also features a solar deck around the pool and other green features (Marmol Radziner is also getting into prefab and modular building). And Steve Lazar of Lazar Design/Build is working with Anthony Poon of Poon Design to put a mixed-use office and condo building at 838 Manhattan Beach Blvd with 2500 square feet of green roof.
“You can walk from your unit,” says Lazar, “out onto a roof of real dirt, real trees, grass, shrubs. Your own open space that’s alive, organic. Much nicer than a concrete jungle.”
The soil/gravel system is carefully engineered proper drainage, while holding the right amount of water without too much expansion or contraction. Aside from aesthetics, it provides spectacular insulation, there’s less runoff for the sewer system, and it provides a benefit of better air quality to the inhabitants of the home as well as the neighborhood.
One other way to go: think smaller and smarter.
Part of smarter is taking advantage of the great southern California climate by integrating indoor and outdoor space.
“We had a client in Hermosa with a first-floor view from Malibu to San Pedro. They totally fell in love with it. That’s a million dollar view; you don’t mind spending $50,000 on triple-track doors that open up completely to give them that unobstructed view. On the container house, we have airplane hangar doors that open up on two sides to integrate the interior space with the outside.”
Killen has worked a similar magic at his Widmann Residence in Hermosa, where lots of triple-track sliding glass effectively double the amount of living space, and Meyer has used overhead garage doors and triple-tracks to open his houses up.
“It’s like being in a tree house,” he says, “why would you not want to take advantage of this amazing climate? People would never have done this 20 years ago. I think it’s great we’re breaking all these rules and making it possible for people live in ways that never would have been conceived of before.”
Meyer has pushed the envelope in other ways, like building in charging stations for electric cars. “It’s a lot like music,” he says. “The greatest creativity comes when people aren’t afraid to break the rules.”
And just as with music, the most creative periods happen when the patrons – the folks making the commissions, be they emperors, industrialists, or entertainment lawyers – are willing to take risks, too.
“Everything we’ve tried, we’ve gotten a great response to,” Meyer says.
Killen would like to keep pushing the envelope in other ways – and he recognizes that some of them are a little harder for the patrons to hear.
“Thinking green isn’t just about picking some nice materials out of a catalog,” says Killen. “But we’re doing things now that will have a huge impact down the road.
That’s an uplifting feeling. That’s something that some of our clients are very much in tune with. I’m not the only one saying ‘we can make a difference’.’
Living on the cutting edge is the ultimate luxury.
And in building, the cutting edge is green.
Some things, it takes a while before the mainstream catches up. For a while - years, even - they remain the purview of the cranks and the hobbyists, folks who dump every spare minute and every spare dime into their crazy projects – and if you aren't lucky, they’ll tell you all about it until your eyes glazed over.
The automobile was like that, until Henry Ford made the it available for everyone. And these days we just take cars for granted.
It’s the same with green building. From the time just a few years ago when it was a specialized field that only a few people were interested in, it’s now exploding into the popular consciousness… and onto the landscape.
(More...)
“People are starting to demand this of the marketplace,” notes architect Peter Barsuk of Hermosa Beach. A member of the Gensler firm in Santa Monica, Barsuk is a board member of the US Green Building Council’s Los Angeles Chapter, and was also involved in setting up Hermosa’s Energy Patnership.
“Ten to fifteen years ago,” he notes, “there were very few architects and contractors that were practicing green building. Nobody understood what it meant or what it was. And if you asked suppliers what materials went into their products, they wouldn’t even tell you.”
What has changed things? In part, it’s pocketbook – as energy costs have risen, people see the impact every month on their bills for heating and air conditioning. And as asthma rates skyrocket, people are thinking more about indoor air quality.
But it’s more than that.
“It may look like an extravagance, but really, it’s spending wisely,” says Peter DeMaria of DeMaria Design Associates and Logical Home in Manhattan Beach.
“Theres a stigma that for something that’s a luxury, somehow there’s waste. But you look at refined designs, like autos, these are as fine as can be. We’re seeing the same thing now that happened with the automobile, or with MP3 players - the market is starting to drive all these alternative materials.”
And there’s an incredible range of options now – so don’t worry if you’re more in the market for a Lexus than a Bentley. The principals apply whether you’re building your dream home, or simply sprucing up your current place.
One thing that’s easy to do, but terribly important for your health and that of your family, is cut out Volatile Organic Compounds, or VOCs. Toxic compounds like formaldehyde are commonly used in furniture, carpet, paint and other building products; we’ve learned that these substances leak out into the air of your home for years, damaging young lungs, and leading to asthma and other respiratory problems, especially in children.
Designer Sarah Bernard recalls, “I was working with a client who had learned that out-gassing from upholstery foam and furniture glue can cause birth defects. She was pregnant at the time, and we were bringing in a lot of furniture – well, that’s a pretty reasonable concern.”
What to do? She works with natural products – hardwoods, linen and wool aren’t processed with chemicals (although you should check for stain-proofing or flameproof coatings). Get furniture that uses staples instead of glue. “Sometimes it’s not even a matter of giving up something,” says Bernard, “but approaching things in a different way.”
And use low-VOC paints, which are now widely available.
“When you use a regular paint,” notes Bernard. “you fill the house with ‘new paint smell’ – those are the gasses being released. With low-VOC there’s minimal gasses, so minimal smell, which is nice for the home-owner. And at this point, there’s almost no price difference.”
VOCs are an issue in new construction, as well. Plywood is notorious for out-gassing formaldehyde into living space. And while there are companies now making VOC-free plywood, many architects are looking at wood as very “last century”.
Patrick Killen, of Studio9one2 in Hermosa, is one of them. “Why,” he asks, “do we build multi-million dollar homes with a material – wood – that expands and contracts with water, attracts termites and mold, and just doesn’t last?”
There are a variety of alternatives, including metal studs – used in commercial construction for years – and a variety of alternative cladding materials.
“Instead of using plywood,” says DeMaria, “we’re using Dens-Guard gold, by Pacific Materials. It’s gypsum-based. Mold proof! Great R value, easy to handle and easy to cut.... With all its benefits, you’ll see this being used more and more often, and then the price will drop.”
DeMaria is also involved in an exciting alternative form of construction – he’s got a residence going up in Hermosa Beach based around four steel shipping containers.
“It’s just an extension of modular construction, really,” he says.
Even so, they had a hard time getting the design approved – it can be tricky, working on the bleeding edge this way - but he thinks it’s a great demonstration project.
“We found this amazing spray-on insulation, SuperTherm. It was used on the space shuttle, the coating is the thickness of a credit card, but has an amazing R value – R30. And at just $1.50 sq ft, it’s not that much more expensive. But in order to get our title 24 report approved, we had to work directly with the State Energy Commission. We must have spent at least 40 hours on the phone. They had never seen anything like this stuff before.”
Several designers are working with prefabricated living spaces, including DeMaria, who is launching a separate firm to deal with prefab. Another is Jennifer Siegal, whose DesignMobile firm is in the development stages to put one of her Swell houses in Manhattan Beach.
“Swell House gets assembled like Legos at your dream spot,” she notes, “and features Biofiber (a recycled cabinet composite made from sunflower seeds), finishing material made from recycled newspapers, and "ply-boo" (renewable bamboo) flooring.”
And where a typical architect-designed residence can cost $400 to $500 per square foot, her Swell Houses go for $200.
Prefab is good for the big-picture environment: it minimizes wasted materials, and also cuts transportation costs (since both materials and workers go to one central location). And it’s great for the local neighborhood environment – instead of months of banging and dust and trucks coming and going, you get one easy delivery.
Another thing that’s hot right now: Tankless hot water heaters, both for new construction and for home upgrades.
“Instead of heating up hot water and then having it sit there, wasting energy, these units flash-heat the water as you need it,” explains James Meyer of LeanArch, a design and build firm with roots in Manhattan Beach. He’s been using these heaters in the South Bay houses he’s been building (including the home of LL&S publisher Todd Klawin). “You save energy, you never run out of hot water, plus you save a lot of space, which in the South Bay with its tiny lots makes a big impact.”
These may cost $600 to $900, instead of $250 for a conventional tank heater – but what’s it worth to add an extra 90 cubic feet of space to your house?
Another new feature is in-floor heating (well, its been in use since Roman Times, but not the way they do it today). Meyer loves to use in the South Bay because it again combines environmental friendliness with space savings.
“With forced air, you kill a lot of space with ductwork,” he notes. “Instead, we build radiant heating into pipes below the floor. Instead of howling fans blowing dry air throughout the house, along with dust, pollen and mold, you have a nice quiet system that puts heat out from the bottom up.”
DeMaria has it in his own home, and notes, “This pays a dividend in the long run. And your feet are warm! My youngest son is 2.5 years old, and he’s rolling around on the bamboo floor, happy as if he’s in the bathtub.”
You can use similar systems for pool heating. Rick White of California Solar has a couple of South-Bay projects that use solar absorption.
“We now have an in-deck system. At one project in Palos Verdes, we’re putting a heat-exchange system under the concrete of the tennis court. The concrete heats up, and we pull the heat off the surface, put it into a medium that then runs it around to the pool. It heats the pool AND cools the tennis court.”
The cost has come down - you can solar heat a pool for $4500-$5500 dollars. Typically that means the break-even point is just 2 to 3 years.
And of rooftop solar has changed in a big way, too.
“I now have solar panels that are terracotta colored, so they don’t stand out like big black panels,” says White. “We specialize in photovoltaic panels that are integrated into roofing tiles. Match the roof right in, so the look is totally integrated.”
Meyer has a project going up at 217 9th Street with a 3 KW array of photovoltaic panels. They cut back on power purchases, and they’re tied into the grid, so when you’re not using power during the day, you feed power back into the grid when you’re not using. Most architects are now working this sort of package into their new designs.
“We have a ways to go,” notes Killen. “We need to put the kind of effort into solar and wind that we put into marketing the iPod. Solar has been around since the ‘70s, so compared with the MP3, progress has been slow. Right now we have the beginnings of building a foundation, but we’re only scratching the surface.”
Almost as important as heating is cooling. At the container house, DeMaria has installed an industrial-sized 12-foot fan – made by the Big Ass Fan company (its mascot is a donkey).
“Air conditioning will suck up 70 percent of your electricity,” he says. “If you’ve got your building properly designed to take advantage of your prevailing winds, you don’t need AC. And the fan keeps everything inside cooled off. The blades are similar to what you’ll find on a helicopter, cast aluminum and aerodynamically correct. You could blow the dishes right off the table if you want to.”
James Meyer’s 9th Street project uses the entire back of the house, which is a three-story open stairwell, to create a stack effect, drawing air up from the ground floor and cooling the entire house.
Likewise, projections over the windows cut their exposure to direct sunlight, making a huge impact on the need for AC.
“The standard Modern design is a big glass box that didn’t pay any attention to appropriate site orientation,” notes Killian, “and had no overhangs to cut exposure of the sun to all that glass. We’re learning…”
Another way to cut the unwanted energy provided by the sun is going with a roofing material that’s light, rather than dark. It’s estimated that dark roofs can get up to 180 degrees on a sunny day; some of that heat leaks into the house, and the rest is radiated back out, heating up the neighborhood. Going light with roofing could cut summer urban temperatures by several degrees – and saving millions of dollars in AC costs.
If you want to go really green in a big way, the ultimate is a Green Roof. Instead of standard roofing material, you have a full environment built on top of the building, complete with soil, grass, trees and shrubs.
The firm of Marmol Radziner is doing one at a project overlooking the ocean in Palos Verdes, which also features a solar deck around the pool and other green features (Marmol Radziner is also getting into prefab and modular building). And Steve Lazar of Lazar Design/Build is working with Anthony Poon of Poon Design to put a mixed-use office and condo building at 838 Manhattan Beach Blvd with 2500 square feet of green roof.
“You can walk from your unit,” says Lazar, “out onto a roof of real dirt, real trees, grass, shrubs. Your own open space that’s alive, organic. Much nicer than a concrete jungle.”
The soil/gravel system is carefully engineered proper drainage, while holding the right amount of water without too much expansion or contraction. Aside from aesthetics, it provides spectacular insulation, there’s less runoff for the sewer system, and it provides a benefit of better air quality to the inhabitants of the home as well as the neighborhood.
One other way to go: think smaller and smarter.
Part of smarter is taking advantage of the great southern California climate by integrating indoor and outdoor space.
“We had a client in Hermosa with a first-floor view from Malibu to San Pedro. They totally fell in love with it. That’s a million dollar view; you don’t mind spending $50,000 on triple-track doors that open up completely to give them that unobstructed view. On the container house, we have airplane hangar doors that open up on two sides to integrate the interior space with the outside.”
Killen has worked a similar magic at his Widmann Residence in Hermosa, where lots of triple-track sliding glass effectively double the amount of living space, and Meyer has used overhead garage doors and triple-tracks to open his houses up.
“It’s like being in a tree house,” he says, “why would you not want to take advantage of this amazing climate? People would never have done this 20 years ago. I think it’s great we’re breaking all these rules and making it possible for people live in ways that never would have been conceived of before.”
Meyer has pushed the envelope in other ways, like building in charging stations for electric cars. “It’s a lot like music,” he says. “The greatest creativity comes when people aren’t afraid to break the rules.”
And just as with music, the most creative periods happen when the patrons – the folks making the commissions, be they emperors, industrialists, or entertainment lawyers – are willing to take risks, too.
“Everything we’ve tried, we’ve gotten a great response to,” Meyer says.
Killen would like to keep pushing the envelope in other ways – and he recognizes that some of them are a little harder for the patrons to hear.
“Thinking green isn’t just about picking some nice materials out of a catalog,” says Killen. “But we’re doing things now that will have a huge impact down the road.
That’s an uplifting feeling. That’s something that some of our clients are very much in tune with. I’m not the only one saying ‘we can make a difference’.’
Friday, June 01, 2007
Going Solar
(Appeared in the Iranian Jewish Chronicle)
"Going Green" isn't just good for the planet – it's good for the pocketbook, too
We've been hearing a lot lately about "saving the earth". But the Jewish concept is much older. We call it "Tikkun Olam," and halachically, it's the idea that G-d didn't finish creation, but put each of us here to do our small part to complete the work.
One form of saving that's come into prominence this year is solar power. It saves energy, it saves money, and it's a growing part of the work to save the planet.
Technology has been moving forward, but the biggest change in the solar environment comes from the political side: at both the state and federal level, governments are encouraging people and businesses to go solar.
(More...)
Putting money where their mouth is
"California has shown some incredible leadership," says Isaac Hamadan, of Solar Energy Exchange. "The California Solar Initiative makes direct grants that cover 23 percent of your costs."
On top of that, the Federal Government provides direct tax credits for 30 percent of the total bill for homes and businesses (although home use is capped at $2000 right now). Plus, you can depreciate it over five years. And of course, it provides electric power, cutting your power bill by 80 percent or more depending your configuration.
"The cost of electricity is going up every year," says Abe Moradian of Beverly Hills, "so I think I'll get my investment back sooner than they think. Living here, my bills are particularly high. I've had months where my bill is $300, and months when I'm heating my pool where it goes as high as $600."
As president of AMC International, a trade consulting company, Moradian knows how to figure a balance sheet. But, he says, making this decision was about more than the bottom line.
"It's clean energy. And it's good for energy independence, and that's good for everybody."
Moradian is a pretty typical solar customer: he's doing an installation on a pre-existing home, with panels built on to the roof, plus he's getting a passive solar heating system built around his pool.
Pool systems run around $5,000, and can pay for themselves in just three years. Full-house systems run from $20,000 to $40,000, and can pay for themselves in 10 years or less. Plus, Hamadan notes, you can finance them with a home equity line of credit, they add value to your home, and they're property-tax-exempt.
Doing good and looking good
For those who don't relish the though of industrial-looking black panels overlooking their front yard – the past couple of years have seen some amazing new products hit the market.
"I now have solar panels that are terracotta colored, so they don't stand out like big black panels," says Rick White, or California Solar. "We specialize in photovoltaic panels that are integrated into roofing tiles. They match the roof, and they're built right in, totally integrated with the other roofing tiles."
Likewise, for those with shingle roofs, there are now solar panels that match those. The solar becomes just one component to a standard roof. Plus they last longer than standard shingles or terracotta – and unlike standard roofing which bakes in the sun on hot days, these panels take the sun's energy and turn them into power – making a significant dent in air conditioning bills, as well.
"The system panels I install are warranteed for 25 years," says Hamadan. "That's confidence. How long will they actually last? We think 30 years or more."
Becoming part of the system
One of the most exciting things happening now is what's called "Grid-tied" systems. With this setup, your solar system is linked in with the power grid. During the hot mid-day hours when you're generating lots of power, the excess flows into the power grid, actually running your meter backwards! You're credited for the power during the day; after the sun goes down, you pull the power you were credited back in from the grid.
You can also get a system with full battery-backups, so you can store the power yourself. Or, you can combine the two.
"The other cool thing," says White, "it'll manage your energy. Some people, especially businesses, are on time- of-usage charges – buying electricity during peak periods will charge you more than at 3 a.m. when demand is low. This system fills up the batteries in the middle of the night when energy is cheap, and then you use it during the day when energy is expensive."
Becoming part of the solution
It's nice when you can combine doing the right thing with doing the smart thing. Most forms of Tikun Olam are like that, when you look at them closely.
"I believe it's the future," says Hamadan. "It's the only way we can really survive – we can't move forward with all this usage of crude oil. Electrical demand keeps rising – we can meet that with solar, instead of building more plants that burn coal and oil and gas, and pollute the air our children have to breath.
"This is much better for the earth, and for us."
"Going Green" isn't just good for the planet – it's good for the pocketbook, too
We've been hearing a lot lately about "saving the earth". But the Jewish concept is much older. We call it "Tikkun Olam," and halachically, it's the idea that G-d didn't finish creation, but put each of us here to do our small part to complete the work.
One form of saving that's come into prominence this year is solar power. It saves energy, it saves money, and it's a growing part of the work to save the planet.
Technology has been moving forward, but the biggest change in the solar environment comes from the political side: at both the state and federal level, governments are encouraging people and businesses to go solar.
(More...)
Putting money where their mouth is
"California has shown some incredible leadership," says Isaac Hamadan, of Solar Energy Exchange. "The California Solar Initiative makes direct grants that cover 23 percent of your costs."
On top of that, the Federal Government provides direct tax credits for 30 percent of the total bill for homes and businesses (although home use is capped at $2000 right now). Plus, you can depreciate it over five years. And of course, it provides electric power, cutting your power bill by 80 percent or more depending your configuration.
"The cost of electricity is going up every year," says Abe Moradian of Beverly Hills, "so I think I'll get my investment back sooner than they think. Living here, my bills are particularly high. I've had months where my bill is $300, and months when I'm heating my pool where it goes as high as $600."
As president of AMC International, a trade consulting company, Moradian knows how to figure a balance sheet. But, he says, making this decision was about more than the bottom line.
"It's clean energy. And it's good for energy independence, and that's good for everybody."
Moradian is a pretty typical solar customer: he's doing an installation on a pre-existing home, with panels built on to the roof, plus he's getting a passive solar heating system built around his pool.
Pool systems run around $5,000, and can pay for themselves in just three years. Full-house systems run from $20,000 to $40,000, and can pay for themselves in 10 years or less. Plus, Hamadan notes, you can finance them with a home equity line of credit, they add value to your home, and they're property-tax-exempt.
Doing good and looking good
For those who don't relish the though of industrial-looking black panels overlooking their front yard – the past couple of years have seen some amazing new products hit the market.
"I now have solar panels that are terracotta colored, so they don't stand out like big black panels," says Rick White, or California Solar. "We specialize in photovoltaic panels that are integrated into roofing tiles. They match the roof, and they're built right in, totally integrated with the other roofing tiles."
Likewise, for those with shingle roofs, there are now solar panels that match those. The solar becomes just one component to a standard roof. Plus they last longer than standard shingles or terracotta – and unlike standard roofing which bakes in the sun on hot days, these panels take the sun's energy and turn them into power – making a significant dent in air conditioning bills, as well.
"The system panels I install are warranteed for 25 years," says Hamadan. "That's confidence. How long will they actually last? We think 30 years or more."
Becoming part of the system
One of the most exciting things happening now is what's called "Grid-tied" systems. With this setup, your solar system is linked in with the power grid. During the hot mid-day hours when you're generating lots of power, the excess flows into the power grid, actually running your meter backwards! You're credited for the power during the day; after the sun goes down, you pull the power you were credited back in from the grid.
You can also get a system with full battery-backups, so you can store the power yourself. Or, you can combine the two.
"The other cool thing," says White, "it'll manage your energy. Some people, especially businesses, are on time- of-usage charges – buying electricity during peak periods will charge you more than at 3 a.m. when demand is low. This system fills up the batteries in the middle of the night when energy is cheap, and then you use it during the day when energy is expensive."
Becoming part of the solution
It's nice when you can combine doing the right thing with doing the smart thing. Most forms of Tikun Olam are like that, when you look at them closely.
"I believe it's the future," says Hamadan. "It's the only way we can really survive – we can't move forward with all this usage of crude oil. Electrical demand keeps rising – we can meet that with solar, instead of building more plants that burn coal and oil and gas, and pollute the air our children have to breath.
"This is much better for the earth, and for us."
Tuesday, May 29, 2007
The Mobile Hybrid Experience
Sometimes we wonder how much what we do here ripples out into the wider world.
I was down at the Fiesta Hermosa this past weekend - you'd think that in the chi chi beach cities of LA you'd see greening everywhere, but of approximately 200 craft vendors, I only spotted a paltry two doing anything remotely sustainable; food was of the American Standard burgers and beer variety; and they didn't even have recycling bins for folks to chuck their diet soda cans into.
But just when I was feeling disheartened I laid eyes on a very cool visual - a 53-foot trailer emblazoned with the words "Mobile Hybrid Experience". Inside, a bookish blond in a blue Toyota t-shirt explained that this is part of the company's "Highway to the Future" project, and we're welcome to explore the interactive activities and games.
And as incentive, she handed each of us a little packet of organic basil seeds - there's a bar-code on each packet, and bar-code readers at each of the stations, so you receive 50 to 100 'miles' for each activity you do. Learn about the different energy contributions of hydrogen, gasoline, biodiesel, natural gas and electric vehicles, and you get enough points for a pencil. Hit a couple more stations, and learn about hybrids - how the lithium ion battery works, or how the breaking system pumps electricity back into the battery - and you've got enough points to have a tree planted by the Arbor Day Foundation. Play the driving game - okay, it's not really a game, more of a demo, but you're seated, there are foot pedals and a steering wheel, and a big video-game screen - and you have enough for the coolest prize, a self-generating flashlight that Ed Begley Jr. has made famous (shake it... it charges... it lights up!).
The prize system is brilliant, since most people coming through are motivated to get the flashlight and actually read through all the info, took the quizzes, played the games.
"Our average is 22 minutes spent, which is huge for event marketing," notes Mark Ulbrich, the West Coast road producer. "And we're getting 800 to 1,000 people a day to step back and look at how they're relying on finite resources, to look at other solutions."
And with the scanner system, Toyota is getting a huge amount of invaluable data - on what average people are interested in and what kinds of marketing pushes are effective in reaching them. Logically, they are taking the show on the road. Follow the link to find out how you can get your own Mobile Hybrid Experience.
Friday, May 18, 2007
Spring Into Equinox
(Crossposted at EcoFabulous)
It's doubtful that you would consider the Chevy Equinox a luxury vehicle (it is more of a tough little SUV)... but what they're doing with it is pretty ambitious and potentially appealing. Starting next fall, the folks at Chevrolet are doing a test-market of an all-electric vehicle powered by hydrogen fuel cells. This is the same power system as the definitively cool Chevy Sequel concept car. It is capable of 750 pounds of passenger/cargo payload, can travel 200 miles between recharges, and cruise at speeds of 100 mph (note to Mel Gibson: don't try this in Malibu). Unlike hybrids, no gasoline is involved - hydrogen unites with oxygen in the cells to make H2O. Power goes to the wheels, and the tailpipe spews out nice, clean water vapor. Of course, the hydrogen has to be generated at a plant somewhere and there are lots of questions about that, so this anything but a perfect system; but it sure could help improve the air quality in U.S. cities.
And speaking of cities... if you live in metropolitan NYC, DC or Southern California, you're eligible for this fall's test-market. Register on the website, and you could be one of the lucky Top Guns to put these cutting-edge vehicles through their paces on your daily commute. Hopefully this is not just another distraction by major vehicle manufacturers.
Sunday, April 29, 2007
Congealed Electricity
(Cross-posted at EcoFabulous)"Congealed electricity"?
It sounds very technical but it's actually the nickname they gave aluminum back in the '50s, since it's so incredibly energy-intensive to create. You'll actually find most aluminum smelters near hydroelectric dams (like those in Washington State).
The good news is that we have become such good recyclers that the volume of aluminum cans going into landfills is actually dropping! About half of the reclaimed metal goes straight back into cans; as for the rest, it goes into some very cool products, like this "Louis the Umpteenth side table" from Johnston-Ready, available at fab new online eco-shop greenwithglamour.com.
In place of the usual rococo gilding, the aluminum finish makes for a chic modern twist to Hollywood's most glam, without sacrificing the essential ornateness of the period.
You can also clean up with Eleek's sleek line of aluminum sinks, from the mod waterbox to the useful waterfalling with its built-in strainer (all available with artist patinas and powdercoats).
Saturday, April 14, 2007
"Bright" as in "Smart"
(Cross-posted at EcoFabulous.)
Think about light bulbs.
Millions of light bulbs. In scoreboards and moving displays. Think of the trash as they burn out and are replaced.
Now, think of LEDs. Millions of tiny little near-immortal LEDs. All computer-controlled with a degree of precision and sharpness you could never get from light bulbs, and all using 95% less power.
Element Labs is doing it in spectacular fashion, from concerts to sports arenas to homes – check out the 45,000 square foot display that covered the length of the stadium for the Asian Games in Doha. They’ve become a staple of concert tours and music videos, and now they’re moving into high-end restaurants and very high-end homes.
The possibilities are endless: imagine a wall in your living room that’s a non-stop moving art installation… or a display that can give you sunshine on a cloudy day. But beware when you tell your friends and neighbors - they will certainly all want to come over and share the spot light(s)!!
Think about light bulbs. Millions of light bulbs. In scoreboards and moving displays. Think of the trash as they burn out and are replaced.
Now, think of LEDs. Millions of tiny little near-immortal LEDs. All computer-controlled with a degree of precision and sharpness you could never get from light bulbs, and all using 95% less power.
Element Labs is doing it in spectacular fashion, from concerts to sports arenas to homes – check out the 45,000 square foot display that covered the length of the stadium for the Asian Games in Doha. They’ve become a staple of concert tours and music videos, and now they’re moving into high-end restaurants and very high-end homes.
The possibilities are endless: imagine a wall in your living room that’s a non-stop moving art installation… or a display that can give you sunshine on a cloudy day. But beware when you tell your friends and neighbors - they will certainly all want to come over and share the spot light(s)!!
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